


Like free bloody birds

by Lilliburlero



Category: The Charioteer - Mary Renault
Genre: 1970s, Future Fic, Gen, Homophobia, Literary References & Allusions, Nausea
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-02-24
Updated: 2015-02-24
Packaged: 2018-03-14 20:08:37
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3423908
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Lilliburlero/pseuds/Lilliburlero
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>1975: Ralph Lanyon in the back seat of a Ford Capri.</p><p>*</p><p>Advisory: allusions to homophobia and sectarianism; Glaswegian synonym for 'individual'.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Like free bloody birds

Over the fifteen years of his employment there, responsibility for the more routine sort of entertainment of the firm’s clients had gradually devolved on him: he was often out three nights a week. When in touchy humour he could find it in himself to wonder if it were deliberately meant. Slogging hungover and chain-smoking through an afternoon meeting chaired by Stapleton (who began as he meant to go on, by reading previously-circulated minutes aloud in a pedantic nursery cadence) he certainly _felt_ like the oldest bit of rent in town. But he also knew that his colleagues never thought beyond _Lanyon’s not married, tells a good story and can hold his drink:_ indeed, for eight of those fifteen years he’d traded on that obliviousness, because it was a worldly enough line of work that he could not trade on naïveté. In the last seven he’d periodically contemplated making an unmistakable allusion in response to yet another well-worn jocosity, but the satisfaction would be fleeting and the consequences intolerable. The closest he’d ever come to disclosure had been to Stapleton, as it happened, whose own irregular situation (pregnant girlfriend married to an R.C. who wouldn’t see sense) elicited a general sympathy tinged with scorn. Protesting the imposition of the ninth engagement in a fortnight, Ralph had said mildly _I do have a home life, you know, in my own way_. But it hadn’t gone in; Stapleton had on that occasion simply absorbed shrimp cocktail, sirloin in pepper sauce and lemon meringue pie in his stead while he’d gone home to Laurie in deadline purdah and a cheese and Branston pickle sandwich in front of _The Sweeney_. Once in a while, the hospitality took a less mundane turn: he would catch a particular sort of glance and hold it, make a remark or two, suggest a talkative but unobtrusive pub after the others had gone back to their guesthouse. Twice in fifteen years such nights had not ended, as they usually did, with his acknowledgement that he had all he needed at home. At one time Laurie had got up to rather more; he did not find the prospect of confession as powerfully dissuasive as Ralph did.

But nothing like the pair―the _couple_ ―from Yarrows had shown up before, and though he expected nothing of the sort that might end in one of those oblique, embarrassing admissions to Laurie's carefully-arranged _understanding_ expression―the men were thirty years younger than he and visibly (if you knew what to look for) honeymooning―it excited him just to be in their company. It was odd to reflect that, living north of the border, they enjoyed fewer freedoms than he did himself, existed still under effectively the same sanctions that had hedged and delimited his life for nearly half a century: they had the fine unconscious arrogance of everyone young. A couple of lines from a poem Laurie had read to him and which he had disliked with unexpected intensity, having usually found the poet’s emissions to represent the slightly more tolerable end of modern verse, returned with new meaning and force: _And beyond it, the deep blue air, that shows/Nothing, and is nowhere, and is endless._ He accepted their offer of a lift and hotel-lounge nightcap and climbed into the back of their Ford Capri, cheerfully citing the other passenger’s four inches on him in length of leg. 

There are some circumstances at sea―many involving diesel leaks―under which practically everybody will be sick, but precisely because this is so, Ralph had always had company in misery. He had more experience in coping with others’ nausea than his own, and though it made him impatient, he knew if nothing else that a sufferer not allowed to go below, keep warm, lie down and spew as necessary will develop one of those raging, contagious complexes about it, so he usually managed it pretty well. This was different. He’d had a fair skinful: gin and claret and brandy, and refusing both soup and pudding, had eaten as little of the intervening course as was compatible with a residual wartime conscience in perpetual contention with the spectre of a 36” waistband. (He heard a distinct and unidentifiable voice speak from the farther shore of rationing: _Everyone ought to waste things who can afford to. It keeps down unemployment_.) 

The upholstery was pink, orange and black tartan, particularly lurid when caught in a flash of sodium street lighting, and Ralph could not at any point on these looping outer-suburban roads sight the horizon. The driver’s Belfast accent scraped his prickling scalp: he gathered from it that their conveyance was a well-kept early model, with slightly unsatisfactory torque and wretched suspension; he groped with uncharacteristic lack of success for a reply that would not merely be a brusque confirmation of the latter assertion. Ralph didn't mind car chat, in the ordinary run of things, but he had a long-standing prejudice against motor bores, and he was increasingly sure he had made a ghastly mistake in tagging along. They plunged into a short, low tunnel, half-tiled like a swimming pool; he opened his lips to the appalled awareness that all that was likely to proceed was vomit, and shut them again. Acid rose into his mouth, something cold, chemical and unutterably filthy spread through his sinuses; his diaphragm heaved. The back passenger window did not open. The shame was insupportable, entire, pristine. Leaning back and putting his hand into his pocket to retrieve his handkerchief brought on a further spasm. His ears filled with a sussuration wilder than the sound of tyres on tarmac. There had been several times in his life when the animal effort of containment had consumed him, leaving nothing for higher, human function; he felt the sensation now as if in little, changed in degree but not in kind. He closed his eyes. He was not sure what he would see when he opened them again―a grey-green wave coated with choking iridescent black, perhaps, or a thick bar of light filled with scintillant motes in a dun-coloured study, or the creased points of his mother's oxblood shoes on the cinder path. 

‘―Ian, pull the fuck over. The old cunt’s had a stroke or something.’

In fact, Ralph’s eyes opened to the passenger’s hand on the driver’s knee―alarm having turned the impersonal, public iteration of that gesture into quite another. He grinned hideously and clapped his handkerchief to his mouth. Through it he managed, ‘You’re right about the suspension.’

It could have been worse, he thought, bent double over the scrubby grass verge: he had forfeited his dignity, but preserved the upholstery. With an intransigent solicitude that Ralph imprecisely identified as _Celtic_ , Kenneth and Ian insisted he take the front seat for the short remainder of the drive to their hotel (a former coaching inn called for no reason Ralph could ascertain The Temeraire; his pleasantry about feeling rather like Turner’s version met with the affable, uncomprehending smiles of people for whom mental categories are impermeable) and stood him more than one for the road. He took a taxi home. Obviating his customary small talk with the cabbie, he leaned his brow against the cool, smeared glass and thought of nothing, and nowhere, until it seemed endless.

**Author's Note:**

> This was going to be an account of the dinner engagement mentioned in [Chapter 1](http://archiveofourown.org/works/2015577/chapters/4370958) of 'The Parting Glass', but Philip Larkin and some 70s TV made themselves felt, so 1975 it has to be. (The TV programme was originally going to be _The Professionals_ , for fairly obvious reasons, but that first aired a bit too late for my purposes.)
> 
> The poem quoted is ['High Windows'](http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/178053). The Turner painting alluded to is [this one](http://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/9/94/Turner%2C_J._M._W._-_The_Fighting_T%C3%A9m%C3%A9raire_tugged_to_her_last_Berth_to_be_broken.jpg).


End file.
